[bumped/promoted. - rba]

Hat tip to Media Giraffe.

Anniston, for those not from the deep south, is on the border between Alabama and Georgia and was the original home of one of the finest (fifth largest and recipient of a Tony Award) Shakespearean theaters and festivals in the country (Y'all come back, ya hear!). The King Lear I saw there was the very best version I have ever seen. Chilling. So I was not at all surprised to run into this profile of the publisher of the local paper - The Anniston Star, posted at Journalism that Matters project.

"I would ask you to explain to me what is the objective view of lousy health care, poor schools, racial murder and injustice?" H. Brandt Ayres Publisher / The Anniston Star

According to the blurb at Media Giraffe, Ayres has turned his newspaper into a teaching organization, to regain the community advocacy that was the hallmark of the fourth estate before objectivity became the shibboleth for "above the fray" smugness.

Ayers Institute for Community Journalism
Anniston, AL
http://www.comj.ua.edu/
cwaddle@annistonstar.com
4305 McClelland Blvd.
P.O. Box 189
Anniston, AL 36202

Ayres cited among his “crimes of advocacy” helping to form a committee to mediate racial disputes, reforming a poor city-owned hospital to a quality regional medical center, helping form a coalition to provide a poor minority city school system, helping raise funds to help solve a racially-motivated killing, a voter-registration crusade and reporting on financial abuses by an anti-poverty agency.

"With limited leadership and very little revenues, 73% of those who responded pronounced their sites to be a success.

One of the goodies we picked up while at Media Giraffe in DC is the Ford foundation funded study (The J-Labs Report: Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of the News?) completed by Jan Schaffer and the good folks at J-Lab: The Institute for Interaction Journalism, associated with the Philip Merrill College of Journalism, University of Maryland.

The data for the study consist of survey responses and interviews with what is known now as hyper-local citizen media sites ( See a breakdown of types of citizen media sites in Bridging the Gap between Citizen Journalists and Traditional Media).  Hyperlocal sites are those -- such as the New Haven Independent, Free New Mexican, The Forum, Westport Now!, and ibrattleboro -- that serve to report on news in a geographic community, which has often been abandoned by the traditional media.  (Note: ePluribus Media is not considered a hyperlocal site because we primarily investigative on a national scope and we are not rooted in a geographic local community, say such as Muncie, Indiana.)

Originally posted Fri Jun 29, 2007 at 08:53:40 AM CST

A year ago, as a participant in the UMass MediaGiraffe project in Amherst, I was struck by how, even in a symposium dedicated to sticking our necks out and sharing ideas across boundaries, the attendees, myself included, seemed to cling to our own tribes. Print media over here; broadcasters over there; citizen journalists and bloggers in that corner, activists in yet another. Much of this self-segregation may have been caused by the venue itself, an underground concrete space with dark large cavernous rooms. It wasn’t until the last day that real sharing began, and by that time, most of the representatives from the traditional media had gone home.

But much has changed in a year.

Originally posted Thu Jun 21, 2007 at 10:02:53 AM EST -- bumped and promoted -- cho

Tony Sutton of ColdType interviewed by Jason Miller

Nearly asphyxiated by the fetid stench wafting from the mendacious corporate media pundits I've been profiling, I decided to ascend from the intellectual sewer into which I had crawled in order to observe them in their natural habitat. At last some detoxified air! It was an incredible boost to my faltering faith in humanity when I recently had the privilege to conduct a cyber-interview with Tony Sutton, the editor and publisher of ColdType, an online journal which presents "Writing Worth Reading from around the World."

Below is a talk I presented as part of a panel at the 2007 annual Computers and Writing conference help at Wayne State University from the 17th to the 20th of May.  I posted another talk last Sunday on my own blog.  The third?  You'll have to wait for publication of my book Blogging America: The New Public Sphere by Praeger in December.

I'm posting this one here at ePluribus Media because you will find (if you make it to the end) that it has a great deal to do with Citizen Journalism as practiced here:

As mentioned in my March News and Notes, I was invited to Wisconsin to talk about Citizen Journalism.

First kudos to Susie Dow for the brochure from last year's YearlyKos and Roxy's updating it with one of the more recent ePluribus Media blogads. And wanderindiana answered a last minute desperation call for a solid and thorough proofread!

When I picked up my registration packet, I was thrilled to see our brochure tucked in the pocket, looking as if it had been designed to coordinate with the folder and the AP Editors agenda materials. What a delightfully happy happenstance!

So thanks again to Susie, Roxy and wanderindiana for the design, writing and proofreading work. Susie Dow also put together this year's lanyard and ePluribus Media "press badge." I thought we looked pretty spiffy!

I attended the Second Annual Online Journalism Review Conference at the USC Annenberg School of Communication in Los Angeles, on March 30, 2007. Rather than a conference driven by the more usual format of panel discussions, the speakers acted as moderators to promote discussion within the audience.

Live blogging coverage:
Welcome by Robert Niles of ojr.org
From Blogging to Business - Rafat Ali of paidcontent.org moderator  
From MySpace to Your Space - Janine Warner discussed online communities
How to sell your website without selling out - Laurie Niles of Violinist.com

If I took one thing away from the conference, it's that we (ePM) could expand scoop outreach to try to get repeating "columnists" on a schedule much like Jeff Huber and rba currently post now.

Much of what was discussed at the conference revolved around generating revenue. But much of it also touched on the "idea" of expansion and ways to expand services to a greater online community. ePluribus Media has the citizen journalist tool box. We also could initiate a directory of citizen journalists (and journals) from around the country listed by location.

A Reminder of Why Fact-Checking is Important

...check out the DVD Shattered Glass, which as the Amazon review notes: "tells the true story of fraudulent Washington, D.C. journalist Stephen Glass (Christensen), who rose to meteoric heights as a young writer in his 20s, becoming a staff writer at The New Republic for three years (1995-1998), where 27 of his 41 published stories were either partially or completely made up."

Background on our List

Back in June of 2005, our fact-checking maven put together a checklist for ePluribus Media folk when they are going over articles and pieces intended for the ePluribus Media Journal (this list is distinct, of course, from any editorial or copy-editing that is also done).

Some folks think that "fact checking" is merely a matter of making sure that a hyperlink goes to the right web site, but in fact (ouch, bad pun), it is much more.

Yes, the process involves making sure that facts and details are correct and accurate, but it also ensures that the article is free of speculation presented as fact.

To take a look at the list our maven generated a year and half ago to guide our fact checking process, make the jump below the fold by clicking the Full Story link.